At restaurants or other locations, a beverage is often formed from a dispenser as a mixture of syrup and water. Depending on the beverage, the water may or may not be carbonated. An advantage of dispensing beverage in this form is that the dispenser, syrup containers and a water supply typically occupy less space than is otherwise required to store the same volume of beverage in individual containers. Moreover, providing beverage from a dispenser eliminates the need for the establishment to have to deal with the waste formed by empty individual containers.
A typical beverage dispenser includes a number of dispensing heads. Each head is connected to a different source of syrup and a water source. Often, especially at a self-serve location, the beverage dispenser includes an ice dispenser. This allows a customer, at a single location, to fill a container with both ice and a beverage of choice. An advantage of this arrangement is that it allows the customer, without staff involvement, to fill the container with the specific proportions of ice and beverage preferred by the customer. This frees the staff from having to fill beverage containers so they are available for other duties. Moreover, many consumers enjoy having control over the volume and type of beverage and the quantity of ice they place in their own containers. Many commercially available beverage dispensers only dispense a single form of ice, cubed ice. This is because this is the form in which the ice is stored in the bin integral with the dispenser.
Some consumers prefer beverages with crushed rather than cubed ice. A simple solution to this concern is to place an ice crusher at the head of the discharge chute through which the ice is discharged. The crusher would automatically crush the cubes prior to their discharge. Alternatively, the ice bin is filled with crushed ice. This would eliminate even the need to provide an ice crusher.
A disadvantage to the above solutions is that the dispenser would not dispense cubed ice. Customers who prefer this type of ice with their beverages would be disappointed.